Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O’Hara is Purcell Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. A citizen of both Ireland and the United States, she received her doctorate in finance from Northwestern University and honorary doctorates from Facultés Universitaires Catholiques à Mons (FUCAM), Universität Bern, and University College Dublin. Professor O’Hara is an expert on market microstructure, and she publishes widely on such topics as banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, and blockchain and cryptomarkets. She is the author of numerous journal articles as well as the books Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell, 1995), and High Frequency Trading: New Realities for Traders, Markets, and Regulators (Risk Books, 2013).  Her most recent book is Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street (Norton Books, 2013).

A past president of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the Financial Management Association, she also served as executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. Professor O’Hara has served on a variety of corporate boards, including NewStar Financial, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, and The Jeffrey Company, and was chair of the board at Investment Technology Group, Inc. She is currently an advisor to Ava Labs, Inc., a cryptocurrency blockchain company, and to BMLL Technologies, a data and analytics provider. She was a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the “flash crash” committee) and served on the Global Advisory Board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the Advisory Board of the Office of Financial Research US Treasury, the SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee. She is currently on the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Recent honors include being selected as “Quant Researcher of the Year in 2023” by the Journal of Portfolio Management, receiving the Vertin Award from CFA Institute Research Foundation, and being named to Institutional Investors Trading Technology Top 40. She serves on the advisory council of the Financial Analysts Journal and is a Trustee Emeritus at CFA Institute Research Foundation